A picture I took off the highway in northern Arizona next to Dead River:

The age of the automobile has taken nearly three times as many American lives as has all the wars of this nation since 1899. Nearly 4 people died by vehicle every hour of everyday in just the year 2011 for a total of 32,310. That number excludes those countless victims who survived, impaired with injuries. Now if we add in the number of humans sacrificed in oil wars over the years for the gas tanks of the West’s automobiles, then we would have to add millions more to the list of dead. The number of car crash fatalities since 9-11 has been calculated by the site death-by-car whose findings are that Osama bin Laden doesn’t hold a candle to the carnage on our roads:

From 1/1/2002 through 12/31/2011, National Highway Traffic Safety [sic] Administration statistics show that 392,621 people were killed by motor vehicle collisions in the United States. So, that’s about 100 9/11s. (And it does not count those who died from automotive air pollution and physical deconditioning.)

Recently while driving on the northern outskirts of Lake Havasu City, something odd with a car driving just ahead of me grabbed my attention. When I caught up to the tracks of the preceding car, I realized that what had appeared to be a brown paper bag tumbling under the car’s wheels was actually a desert rabbit. As I passed I could see his back legs had been crushed and he was dragging himself off the road with his front legs. I imagine the number of animals becoming roadkill during the last 113 years is unfathomable, but a few organizations have taken a stab at it:

…During the late 1950s, in a roadside version of the Audubon’s Christmas bird counts, the Humane Society of the United States conducted some Fourth of July body counts. During the 1970s, again groping for numbers, the Humane Society compiled data from isolated scientific studies of single roads or single species. Its secondary sources yielded the same national death toll as its field studies: one million animals a day.

Two regional surveys during 1993 and 1994 offer updated species death counts. Called “Dr. Splatt” and coordinated by the preppy Pinkerton Academy, the ongoing project involves mostly pupils in grades six to nine from 40 schools throughout the Northeast U.S. Concerned readers of the monthly Animal People also participate. Reliable death data, however, still remains elusive…

…The first victim was a New York City real estate agent with the appropriately ominous name of Henry H. Bliss. On Sept. 13, 1899, Mr. Bliss alighted from a New York City trolley car, then turned and offered his hand to assist a companion, identified in news reports only as “Miss Lee.”

In that instant, a speeding taxi cab hit the man and ran over him, crushing his chest and skull. He was taken to Roosevelt Hospital, where doctors said it was hopeless. Henry Bliss died the next day, the first known automobile fatality in U.S. history. Millions of his countrymen would follow him to the grave.

In the ensuing 113 years, vehicular traffic on the highways and byways of this country has taken a toll in human suffering that can be accurately described as a holocaust. The total number of dead from that September day in 1899 to this October day in 2012 is approximately 3,573,384.

For the first half of 2012, traffic fatalities in the U.S. have ticked back up!:

Traffic deaths in the U.S. jumped 9% in the first half of 2012, making it the biggest half-year jump since 1985.

More than 16,000 people have died on the roads so far this year, according to a new report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

“This news is very disturbing,” Lon Anderson, spokesman for AAA Mid-Atlantic, said in a statement, according to CNN. “We have worked decades to reduce fatalities in America… but this is a serious shot across the bow, a warning that as we drive more, our roads may not be as safe as we thought they were, CNN reports…

Traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for people in China under the age of 45, according to public health experts…

…China has nearly 70,000 police-confirmed traffic deaths a year, twice the figure for the United States. The actual discrepancy may be even greater. Chinese and Western traffic safety experts say that while the United States figures are extremely reliable and take into account virtually every death, only a small fraction of all traffic deaths in China show up in official figures because of widespread underreporting by the local police.

A comparison of government and industry data shows that the annual frequency of police-reported traffic deaths per million registered vehicles in China appears to be roughly six times as high as in the United States. And if the chronic underreporting by the police of China’s traffic deaths is factored in, the true annual rate of traffic deaths per million registered vehicles appears to be nearly 20 times as high.

A joint study last year by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore and Central South University in Changsha, China, of traffic deaths throughout China in 2007 found that nearly three times as many traffic deaths showed up in the Health Ministry’s death registration data than had been reported by the police…

If the above reasons don’t give you a clue, our highly individualistic mode of transporthas another Achilles’ heel, among others, which gives real meaning to the term Carmageddon:

…Oil, the source of the car’s pervasiveness, is a rich soup of carbon-based compounds used in almost everything we see and use around us: paraffin, artificial fertilizers, all types of plastics, endless industrial chemicals, asphalt, pesticides, tires, medicine etc. Burning a lot of it on the road is a certain way to make these goods costly or hard to produce. However, while we could survive without asphalt, the same cannot be said about food. In 1940, it took one calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce 2.4 calories of energy in the form of food. 1974 was a turning point: that year, the ratio was 1 calorie of fossil fuel energy for 1 calorie of food. Today, huge amounts of energy and artificial fertilizers are used to work the land, irrigate and package food, transport it over thousands of kilometres to its target markets, refrigerate it etc. All this contributes to a ratio of 10 calories of fossil fuels for every calorie we get from the food itself. In terms of energy, we are eating oil and as it seems, there is not much of it left. As we hail the birth of the 7 billionth person alive today, we are looking in the face of a large scale humanitarian disaster in the decades to follow and the last thing we should be doing is burning up a key food production resource to get to the theatre on a Saturday night…

Share this:

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

About xraymike79

I'm a social critic, political/cultural commentator and artist. The modern industrial world is on the cusp of great changes to our current unsustainable way of life. Most people are oblivious to the paradigm shift that will occur, but some are starting to awaken to the fact that the future will not resemble the halcyon days of the last half century in America as evidenced by the OWS movement. My objective is to highlight important news stories and find the truth that is hidden behind what Joe Bageant called the American Hologram.
www.collapseofindustrialcivilization.com

Connect with me on Twitter:

Connect with me on Tumblr:

OWS knows who really pulls the strings

"...the megawealthy and Washington have become so symbiotic as to be a single entity. Indeed, Occupy's best move, as conservative blogger/financier Gregory Djerejian noted at TheAtlantic.com, was "directing their ire squarely toward the real elites of the country, rather than their bought-and-paid marionettes sitting in Washington."

Preserving the Status Quo

There is no right wing or left wing, only the aristocracy and the serfs (a vertical paradigm).
To know this is to be like a fish who has broken the surface of the water, realizing he was in water the whole time.

A Kabuki Play

"What we have, in what passes for US democracy in 2012, is a kabuki play that Cicero put to papyrus 1948 years earlier. All historical empires and war aggressors have used propaganda to claim their looting and police states were necessary and helpful to the 99%. Instead, a sorrowful history tells us they were almost always for the sole benefit of the 1%."
- Albert Bates

Professor Rick Wolff explains why growth has become a focus of our modern political system. He describes how inequality is created by the way our enterprises are organized. Because a significant portion of our lives are at work, how would our society look if democratic businesses became the new normal? What would be the environmental and social implications […]

The Firefly Gathering offers a wide range of classes for adults and children on primitive skills, permaculture, nature connection, and eco-homesteading that are designed to be able to be applied to enhance everyday life. The gathering gathers a bevy of inspiring, amazing people. Besides classes it offers evening entertainment, basic infrastructure, and on-si […]